Flooded In Light

I want my life to be a story.

No lie. I really, all my life, have wanted it to be something worth writing about, something, I dunno, spectacular and interesting, with perfect dialogue and wonderful emotion. I'm really quite fixated with the idea. Besides the fact that stars are emphasis-adding-expletive awesome and I'm good at math and generally bored with humanities, being an astrophysicist just sounded cool. Good life choice, right? But once you're in, physics has this way of sucking you in deeper until it's a battle for your soul that you have to win before you can move on. I'll graduate with a BA degree in physics but that piece of paper is really just a testament to my stubbornness. I could have changed majors sophomore year. I just hate running away.

Maybe I just wanted the heads to turn, to continue to be unique. After a while, it becomes a badge of courage or a point of pride. Why yes, I am a physics major. I do insanely hard math and apply it to the world around us to decipher its secrets and unlock its mysteries. I also don't sleep much and spend hours writing on boards and reams of paper, working on problem sets and studying derivations time and time again, hoping it'll make sense. Don't you feel sorry for me? Aren't you amazed at what I can do? Don't I just astound you?

And then, of course, after I figured out that I wasn't going to be an astrophysicist, I had to pick something else, something doable and yet impressive, a conversation starter. I'll go to seminary. I'll be a pastor, and a woman pastor at that. I love being in front of a crowd. I love it when they listen to me, to all the knowledge I have to impart. Don't forget all that thankless work as well, those long hours talking to people, caring about people, visiting in hospitals, talking people through their issues, imagining the next great mission project, working out the details for another new discipleship program, hours spent working with schedules, planning meetings, writing letters, all giving me a backstage kind of unspoken glory. Best of all, this would be a great story to tell, how I went from the sciences to religion, how I changed from studying the universe through the secular lens to thinking about it with the lens of faith. People would ask. I'd still be a novelty.

Even the stories I tell, I tell for recognition. I have a friend who's student teaching right now, and he says that God is working great things through his students, or at least working with him through his students. I would love to have some encouragement, love to hear his stories, but like either one of us has time to sit down and write these out. And would it mean anything once you had removed all the details to make sure you protected kids' privacy? It's not fair to them and I understand why he doesn't share his stories. I don't share mine because they're not exciting enough, I haven't gleaned a lesson from them, I don't have a gem of a tale to tell, and so I don't tell them. They're not interesting enough. They don't generate attention.

The saddest bit it, I know it's wrong. I know I shouldn't be seeking all this attention (I about die when I get some- a post from someone I want to hear from, a compliment from a friend, appreciation from students) and I know my life isn't the important one here. But it takes such strength to be humble, so much energy to back away and give someone else the chance to be wonderful, so much effort to remember that I'm not the one in charge here and I'm not the one that's blessing this situation. But the worst thing, the hardest thing? The hardest thing is to know that these words, these things that I'm most proud of, these strings of sentences that give me so much attention and praise, these aren't mine. Someone gave them to me and I send them out, but they are a gift and they aren't mine. Do you think less of me yet?

I know you didn't need to hear all of this, but I wanted you to. It gives me much more of a nuanced character, don't you think? I do so want to be nuanced and complex, with layers to analyze and understand. Just think of it: that awkward girl who laughs too much and can't stand to be stared at is actually an attention-grabbing engineer of her own fate, making her life choices with precision to create the utmost impact on the drab yet poetic scene around her. For all of her quiet moments and inappropriate humor, she is silently weaving a tale of great interest and intrigue with her daily choices, colored with importance and symbolism. She lives a double life with an inside world of such complexity you can't even begin to guess at the truth of its existence until you spend hours in conversation, picking up hints of the greater wonder hidden away behind the never-pretty-enough face. Don't you want to meet her, to get to know her, to understand her? Doesn't she intrigue you? Aren't you curious to see who she is?

Aren't I such a great storyteller?